The present invention relates to pressure monitoring arrangements in general, and more particularly to an arrangement for monitoring pressure pulses in the flow of a gas/particulate material medium through a pipeline or a container.
A multitude of problems is constantly encountered during the taking of pressure pulses for the purpose of pressure measurement and/or differential pressure measurement in pipelines and/or containers through which gases which are heavily loaded with dust or other particulate material, or in which a finely granular dust is loosened or suspended by a carrier or entrainment gas and maintained under pressure or pneumatically conveyed. The encountered difficulties are predominantly such which come into being because of the deposition of dust on the measuring surfaces of the measuring instruments or devices, in the pressure measuring chambers themselves, or in the pulse conduits between the dust-conveying pipeline and/or the container and the pressure measuring instrument. As a result of the deposition of dust in the pulse conduits, the pressure measuring instruments connected to the remote ends of such conduits can be often put out of the operation after a relatively short period of time.
A measurement problem of this kind, wherein the aforementioned difficulties can be encountered, exists in practice, for instance, during the measuring and supervision of the mass stream or flow of a finely granular to pulverulent solid fuel which is pneumatically conveyed by means of a carrier gas from a storage bin or container into a gasification arrangement wherein the solid particulate fuel is gasified by partial oxidation with oxygen. Herein, the solid fuel mass stream which is supplied through a pneumatic conduit to the gasification arrangement is supervised and controlled by means of a process computer, for instance, in accordance with one of the methods disclosed in the U.S. Pat. application Ser. No. 571,518, with the aid of a radiometric density measurement as well as a differential pressure measurement in a Venturi tube. However, an arrangement of this type exhibits a considerable amount of down-time because of the clogging problem mentioned above.